An intonation started him upon a fresh tack. “Did you ever think of self-destruction?”
“More than once. No doubt you have yourself. But because you are young and temperamental. I contemplated putting an end to myself for no such poetic reasons. There were more reasons than one, and generally it was the intense vitality of my mind that deterred me, perhaps an insolent sense of power that would not permit me to lose in the game with life. Now and again, I loved too much—what I then called love; but the reflection that no man was worth the sacrifice restored my cynicism, and cynicism is fatal to that intensity of egoism which counsels annihilation. Strange to think that I once was hard and cynical!”
“At least you might tell me something of your love attacks.” He continued artfully, “I shall never feel really in your confidence until you do.”
“Love affairs of that sort are too commonplace to remember. At first I loved once or twice out of mere youth and racial instinct. But I soon got over that. The great affair? Well, he was the conventional hero, fashioned by satirical Nature for the crudity of youth. He was handsome—but handsome!—brilliant, charming, above all, inconstant—the sort of man that keeps a woman questioning, ‘Will he come?’ Such a man would only incite me to amusement to-day; no type is so ingenuous. But then—well, I tried to kill him one day. He was too quick and too strong for me. I was spared the vulgarity of a newspaper scandal; even a whisper of the attempt never passed my threshold; I took good care that it should not. The mere vision of half a column of headlines with my name in letters as black as Pluto did as much later on to extinguish my love as my separation from the man—I never saw him after. But I had been possessed with the lust to kill, to annihilate, to whirl him and myself out of life. And it was long before that rage, which included everybody and everything on earth, subsided. But at last I came to my senses. And—who knows?—all my life seems to have been but a schooling for my art.”
“Then you regret nothing?”
“I waste no time in futilities, and there is nothing of the Magdalene in my composition.”
“What would you have done if you had not discovered your voice?”
“No doubt I should have discovered in time that I was an actress. Had it not been for that smouldering mental fire in me which always seemed to whisper, ‘Wait! wait!’ I should have become the most famous courtesan of modern times. I had it in me! There were intervals when Cora Pearl inspired me with envy. It was mere instinct—rather the watch-fires of genius—that led me to shun the public eye, even when on the stage.”
“You would have been a horrible woman if you had chosen to go that pace!” he exclaimed, with a sudden access of vision. “You had it in you to become all bad.”
“All.”